Retired Michigan teacher saves thousands of dollars a year with new insulin cost cap

When medical issues forced longtime teacher Pam Bloink to retire, she found that her health insurance copays were quickly burning through her savings. Now, thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, the Rockford, Michigan, resident says her costs are way down.

Bloink, who was first diagnosed with diabetes in 2007, recalls that when she went on Medicare, she lost access to free long-acting insulin. “I was put on insulin. I was still teaching, so one of them I got for free, and the other one was like $10 a month. And then everything changed when I was forced to retire and became disabled. And then it skyrocketed,” she told the Michigan Independent. “I lost my free one because I was on Medicare with my disability, and it was $80 a month.” 

The law, passed by the Democratic-led Congress without a single Republican vote and signed into law by President Joe Biden in 2022, includes a $2,000-a-year cap on out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs beginning in 2025 for Medicare Part D beneficiaries and a $35-a-month cap on the out-of-pocket cost of insulin for those beneficiaries as of January 2023. The bill was backed by Michigan Democratic U.S. Sens. Debbie Stabenow and Gary Peters and Reps. Debbie Dingell, Dan Kildee, Elissa Slotkin, Haley Stevens, and Rashida Tlaib. Vice President Kamala Harris cast the tie-breaking vote to pass the bill in the Senate.

“The $35 a month is a nice big difference,” Bloink said; it has cut her annual insulin cost from $1,068 to $528.

She noted that prescription medications she takes for other medical conditions are even more costly, but that the 2025 cap will help with those.

“My out-of-pocket costs this year are still going to be like $8,000. They were $7,500 last year. So the $2,000 next year is going to make a huge difference,” she explained. “It’s going to get even better.”  

Former President Donald Trump opposed the Inflation Reduction Act, and his campaign has said he intends to roll it back if he wins in November. 

Former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, the front-runner for the Republican nomination for Stabenow’s open Senate seat, has decried the law and vowed to “stop Bidenomics.”

“There’s people that are worse off than I am, but I never thought, with a master’s degree and the money I had saved up, that I would be in this position in my life, of living paycheck to paycheck,” Bloink said. “It would be catastrophic to go back to paying $80 a month for my insulin, to paying $8,000 out of pocket for the year, to have my taxes go up so the rich can get another tax break. You know, it’s just, I wouldn’t be able to make ends meet.”

“We cannot go back to how horrible things were before,” she said.